


Against the Incoming Tide

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [232]
Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 19th Century, Alternate Universe - Boarding School, England - Freeform, Gender Role Reversal, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-19
Updated: 2019-02-19
Packaged: 2019-10-31 13:43:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17850578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: For Loki, school was a deadly dull place.





	Against the Incoming Tide

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Dead Poets Society AU. Prompt from this [generator](http://colormayfade.tumblr.com/generator).

For Loki, school was a deadly dull place. 

The walls were stone and the air was always cold and there was no one to talk to. No one he wanted to talk to, anyway. That was the disadvantage of being the new boy, the only novel face, he’d been told, in nearly two years: everyone else knows each other, has done all their damn lives. They can’t surprise each other anymore, and they don’t want to. The other 35 boys in his form, split evenly between two houses, Nickelby and Witham, they all craved continuity, spend every day reveling in it being the same as the one before it and all the rest to come.

Loki had been at other schools. He’d been a novelty before; usually there was some power in it, or at least a diverting romance. But here, at Grantham, he felt for the first time in his seventeen years a profound sense of isolation, of being actively excluded, and that said shunning came at the hands of such gray people, such a dull lot of solemn boys, carried with it a particular sting.

They were all paper dolls, weren’t they, good little soldiers dutifully marching to the beat of their fathers’ drums. Perhaps it was better that he spent this last year of schooling shut up with such creatures; it would make his escape to the real world, to the halls of Paris and the sweet smog of London all the sweeter in a few months time, wouldn’t it? He’d be turning from shadows, as it were, and into the light. Never mind that his stepfather was none too keen to set him free, that there still remained some question as to whether he’d be allowed to inherit his true father’s trust at 18, as the old man’s will had dictated, or if the wiley man his mother had married so many years ago would try some trick to keep the funds from Loki’s grasp for another year, perhaps two. The possibility was very real. Mr. Odin, after all, was a lawyer, the very same man who had helped Loki’s father draw up the original trust. Oh, he was clever all right. Clever and cruel in equal measure, and none too pleased that his son was, in his eyes, a ne’er do well with few prospects for marriage. At seventeen, no woman, well off or otherwise, had so much asked to come calling, much less made a bid for Loki’s hand. This worried Loki’s mother, of course, but it angered Mr. Odin to no end; it was as if, Loki thought, his stepfather took his lack of prospects personally, as some reflection upon himself, even though all of Cornwall knew very well, thank you, that Loki wasn’t truly his son.

There was that persistent rumor, however, that once upon a time--before or after his marriage, the stories never made clear--Odin had sired a son outside of wedlock, a boy the mother had kindly bestowed her name upon and taken away to London to raise. But in all the years his mother and Mr. Odin had been wed, Loki had never heard the man himself mention this mystery maybe son, which was both disappointing and, knowing Mr. Odin, not at all a surprise. If there was one thing Mr. Odin set a store by, it was tradition, and if he had indeed transgressed, Loki could not conceive of a time when his stepfather would a sin so readily have confessed.

Indeed, it was that same slavish devotion to tradition that had gotten him shipped up here to the North Country, planted like a wind-whipped tree amongst the wide, rocky cliffs of the moors: Grantham had been Mr. Odin’s school, the place he’d spent much of his early life, and oh, Loki thought, staring out across the faded fields, that explained so very much, did it not?

It was also a last-ditch effort at respectability; of that Loki was quite aware. He was to learn to behave, how he might best catch a wife, so that when he made his debut in his eighteenth summer, his dance-card at every ball would be filled, his every waking moment filled with a woman’s hands, a woman’s laughter, and by the time the leaves turned, he’d have a ring on his finger and his future at long last laid out.

Never mind that he didn’t fancy women as partners, that he got hard from a man’s touch, from the sound of another boy moaning into his mouth instead of the spread of a woman’s bosom before him, the turn of a girl’s shapely leg. No one cared. None of that mattered. There were expectations, cultural norms, damn it, and he was to be bent to them by the teachers at Grantham, by the solid influence of a horde of milquetoast boys. Boys who wouldn’t look at him with lust as those at three other schools had; boys who wouldn’t unbutton his fly and ease between his legs in the dark. There weren’t boys like that at Grantham, of that his stepfather was certain; only the best families, the most traditional, respectable, sent their sons there.

Loki had sailed in convinced it couldn’t be as bad as all that. Surely there were a few; he’d have taken even one. But now, after a fortnight of impugned solitude, with only his imagination for company, he’d begun to come to terms with it, how bleak the next year would be.

He sat smoking in one of the parapets, the highest perch he could get to short of the roof. It was quiet there, the sound of the boys playing football in the fields below not so shrill, and the wind that slipped through the window within whose sill he was perched turned the smoke wonderfully about his face. Were there someone there to appreciate it, he thought, lifting his face to the breeze, they’d find it quite fetching the way the soft clouds drifted around him, the way the ash clung to his hair.

He felt himself stir at the thought of someone watching him, of someone standing close enough to pluck the cigarette from his fingers and lean in to lick the taste of good tobacco from his mouth. He sighed a little, turned his lips around the tips and sucked hard for good measure, let his mind wander to the last cock he’d had: a man called Anthony he’d met in town, a member of Mr. Odin’s own club. They had him over for supper of an evening before his parents had tickets for the opera and when Loki had innocently suggested that Anthony--Mr. Carbonell--remain behind to round the night off properly with brandy and cigars, Mr. Odin had looked positively chuffed. Loki latching onto propriety and choosing to converse with an up-and-coming member of society, a man who was a few months from marriage, a man who seemed to live to make his mother proud?--ah, Loki had seen it in his stepfather’s face: a none-too-subtle echo of pride.

“Don’t stay up too late, darling,” his mother had said breezily, her mind already on Mozart. “No doubt Mr. Carbonell has to make an early start.”

Loki had kissed her cheek and nodded gravely at Odin. “Of course, Mother. I shan’t keep him too long.”

He’d been true to his word there, more or less. It had only taken another glass of brandy and a slow, indolent suck on his cigar and then Mr. Carbonell was stretched out before the hearth, groaning, his fine trousers tugged down his thighs and his cock, red bulbous and beautiful, fastened deep in Loki’s throat, his seed--that which would soon be the property of his wife--spilling out in great, eager gushes as he pulled at Loki’s hair and bit back the most delicious of screams.

He had touched Loki, too, his Mr. Carbonell; tugged him to the floor and opened him up and teased him until Loki was trembling and beaming and begging none too quietly to come. But it was the taste of him that Loki remembered now, his tongue toying with the end of his cig; the taste and the sweet, sour smell that clung to his mouth for days.

He took a drag and touched himself gently, tracing the outline of his cock.

What were the odds, he thought, morose now even as he thickened, that I would be in a school with 99 other boys and be the only one like me, the only one who wants a life beyond women and marriage and spending the rest of my life playing house?

If his father had lived, might his life have been different? Or from the first, the moment he fell into the world, was it to be his fate, always, to swim futile against the incoming tide?

He flipped the last ember from the window and reached for his fastenings, got a grip on his cock. And to swim alone, no less. That was the bitter thing. To fight the press of propriety would have been so much easier, wouldn’t it, if he had a partner in crime.

He thought again of Anthony, of his lovely, willing body. Of his closed and stubborn mind.

“This can never happen again,” he’d said at the end of that evening as the fire burned down in the grate.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not a thing that one is supposed to do.”

Loki rolled onto his stomach and propped his head in his hand. Stared. “So?”

“So”--Anthony spread his hands, his dark hair a shock against the rich ruby rug--“what happened tonight was an aberration. If your mother knew--”

“Tsk,” Loki said. “Never mind my mother. It’s your fiance you’re worried about, isn't it? Your Miss Potts.”

“Yes.”

“She’d break it off with you, wouldn’t she? If she knew.”

Antony turned away, gave his eyes to the fire. “Probably. She’d be well within her rights to.”

“Anthony.” Loki reached out and touched the man’s cheek, his knuckles soft, catching scruff. “I’ve no intention of telling anyone.”

He’d bent to kiss him then, a kind of reassurance, and Anthony had let him, had sighed a little and curled a hand into Loki’s hair, the long waves of it, pulled gently at the ebony, damp.

“Oh, kid,” Anthony had said sadly when they parted, when he stood on the stoop with his hat in place, his walking stick firm in his hand. “You’ve got a hell of a road ahead of you, you know that?”

He was fully hard now, there in the parapet, hard and already leaking, but his chest ached, it hurt. It felt as if he’d swallowed a stone.

Oh god, he thought, wild. My whole life like this? Feeling the world from a distance? A fleeting touch of another man here or there, but my body, my soul, turned over in full force to my wife? And what woman will have me anyway? What woman would look at me, really look, and not see? 

His fist moved faster. His throat closed. I can’t do this, he thought. I can’t. I can’t do it alone.

“Excuse me."

The voice startled him, shocked his body into action and he came with a jolt of his hips, a moan he couldn’t swallow, a sudden, violent jerk of hot spunk.

Another boy standing there. A tall, broad-shouldered boy perhaps a year or two younger than him. Blond hair and summer wide eyes. 

“Excuse me,” the boy said again. “What the hell are you doing up here?”

Loki bit back hysteria. “I should think that was apparent.”

The boy blushed, a white wall splashed with pink paint. “You’re not supposed to be up here. The parapet’s strictly off limits.”

“Yes, well,” Loki said, his fist still feeble about his cock. “You’re here too, aren’t you?”

“I had a report. Someone on the ground saw smoke from the window. I thought perhaps there was a fire.”

Loki snorted. “You had a report? What, are you the junior fire brigade?”

The boy squared his shoulders. Younger he might of been, barely peach fuzz on his face, but by god, Loki thought, the lad was all muscle. He looked a proper rugger type.

“No,” the stranger said. “I’m head boy in Witham House. It’s my job to look after things.”

“Is it now? Good for you.”

“You’re in Nickelby House, then, are you? I’ve never seen you before.”

“Oh, you’d remember me, is that it?”

The boy smirked and looked pointedly at Loki’s cock. “I will now, won’t I? At least if I see you from the waist down.”

Loki laughed, startled; half-nerves it was, a half measure of delight. Had this golden boy just made a joke? “What’s your name, impudent head boy of Witham?”

“Thor.” He colored again, this time to the tips of his ears. “My mother let my father name me.”

“Ah, well. Never trust men with such things, eh?” He fumbled for a moment, folded himself back into his trousers. 

“What’s yours?”

“My name, you mean?”

An impatient sound. “Yes.”

Loki sketched a sticky-handed bow. “I am called Loki, your worship. Is that your proper title, by the way? Or would you prefer something simpler, like  _ sir _ ?”

“Thor’s fine.” He wrinkled his nose a bit. It made him look ridiculous young. “Were you smoking up here?”

“Yes,” Loki said. “I was also jacking off. Oh, but you caught that bit, didn't you? Make sure you put both in your report.”

Thor looked affronted. “I’m not going to report you!”

“Why not? Isn’t that your duty?”

“You weren’t hurting anybody.” Thor tilted his head, those blue eyes snagging his. “And you won’t do it again, will you?”

“Which bit?”

“Any of them. Sneak up here. Smoke. The, uh--self-pleasuring.”

Loki slid from the sill, his clothing restored, and wiped his hands on his house sweater. Reached for his blazer. “Let’s say, shall we, Thor, that I won’t do that particular combination of things again, eh?” He smiled at the lad, aimed for reassuring. As amusing as this was, he was ready to make his escape. “Certainly not in your territory, all right?”

Thor bobbed his head. Long strands slipped from the ribbon at the back of his neck and tumbled over his face. “Thank you. And, um”--he shoved a recalcitrant strand of hair from his face, gave Loki an uncertain smile, “just so it’s clear there are no hard feelings, may I say, if you’re ever visiting Witham, do please call on me, won’t you?”

Loki blinked, not sure for a moment if Thor was joking. “Why on earth would I do that?”

The boy looked startled again, overcome, like a sheep about to run. “Why else?” he said, his face a portrait of confusion. “So we can have tea.”


End file.
